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The Phantom Ship, by Captain Marryat.

Captain Frederick Marryat was born July 10 1792, and died August 8 1848.
He retired from the British navy in 1828 in order to devote himself to
writing. In the following 20 years he wrote 26 books, many of which are
among the very best of English literature, and some of which are still
in print.

Marryat had an extraordinary gift for the invention of episodes in his
stories. He says somewhere that when he sat down for the day's work, he
never knew what he was going to write. He certainly was a literary
genius.

"The Phantom Ship" was published in 1839, the thirteenth book to flow
from Marryat's pen. It is one of his very best books.

This e text was transcribed in 1998 by Nick Hodson, and was reformatted
in 2003, and again in 2005.

THE PHANTOM SHIP, BY CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT.

CHAPTER ONE.

About the middle of the seventeenth century, in the outskirts of the
small but fortified town of Terneuse, situated on the right bank of the
Scheldt, and nearly opposite to the island of Walcheren, there was to be
seen in advance of a few other even more humble tenements, a small but
neat cottage, built according to the prevailing taste of the time. The
outside front had, some years back, been painted of a deep orange, the
windows and shutters of a vivid green. To about three feet above the
surface of the earth, it was faced alternately with blue and white
tiles. A small garden, of about two rods of our measure of land,
surrounded the edifice; and this little plot was flanked by a low hedge
of privet, and encircled by a moat full of water, too wide to be leaped
with ease. Over that part of the moat which was in front of the
cottage door was a small and narrow bridge, with ornamented iron
handrails, for the security of the passenger. But the colours,
originally so bright, with which the cottage had been decorated, had now
faded; symptoms of rapid decay were evident in the window sills, the
door jambs, and other wooden parts of the tenement and many of the white
and blue tiles had fallen down and had not been replaced. That much
care had once been bestowed upon this little tenement, was as evident as
that latterly it had been equally neglected.

The inside of the cottage, both on the basement and the floor above, was
divided into two larger rooms in front, and two smaller behind; the
rooms in front could only be called large in comparison with the other
two, as they were little more than twelve feet square, with but one
window to each. The upper floor was, as usual, appropriated to the
bedrooms; on the lower, the two smaller rooms were now used only as a
wash house and a lumber room; while one of the larger was fitted up as a
kitchen, and furnished with dressers, on which the metal utensils for
cookery shone clean and polished as silver. The room itself was
scrupulously neat; but the furniture as well as the utensils, were
scanty. The boards of the floor were of a pure white, and so clean that
you might have laid anything down without fear of soiling it. A strong
deal table, two wooden seated chairs, and a small easy couch, which had
been removed from one of the bedrooms upstairs, were all the moveables
which this room contained. The other front room had been fitted up as a
parlour; but what might be the style of its furniture was now unknown,
for no eye had beheld the contents of that room for nearly seventeen
years, during which it had been hermetically sealed, even to the inmates
of the cottage.

The kitchen, which we have described, was occupied by two persons. One
was a woman, apparently about forty years of age, but worn down by pain
and suffering. She had evidently once possessed much beauty: there were
still the regular outlines, the noble forehead, and the large dark eye;
but there was a tenuity in her features, a wasted appearance, such as to
render the flesh transparent; her brow, when she mused, would sink into
deep wrinkles, premature though they were; and the occasional flashing
of her eyes strongly impressed you with the idea of insanity... Continue reading book >>